"Benson I. Margulies" <benson@odi.com> (05/19/91)
It amazes me how contributors to this list feel compelled to bewail the disasterous and "monopolistic" implications of the Hayes patent from a position of apparent total ignorance of patent law and practice. People seem to think that having to pay a license fee is the end of the world. Guess what? Companies pay each other licence fees on patents all the time, on all kinds of "trivial" and "obvious" items. It dosen't seem to stifle competition. If the holder of the patent charges a moderate fee, then most would-be users will find it cheaper and safer to pay up then to litigate. If they change an extortionate fee, they provide an incentive to hire bigger and better lawyers, and risk losing their patent altogether. So the system is self-corrective -- patents that represent really big novelties command high royalties, and patents that are more minor command low ones. Inventors are rewarded for their efforts, and things all come out in the wash. An important difference from apple/lotus is that those are based on copyright, not patent. A real expert can undoubtedly tell the list why copyrights do not lend themselves as well to this self-adjustment process. I can also provide two alternatives to the Hayes method: 1) a break signal. 2) send a sequence and THEN pause, rather than the other way around. No one asked all these other companies to choose the AT set as the "standard." There's no ANSI spec that I know of. The whole idea of patents is to guarantee that inventors of useful novelties get some compensation from other users. If Hayes went and invented a command set that is so widely admired as to be universally copied, I think they deserve a reasonable royalty on every modem, be it on the escape sequence, AT, or whatever.